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462 THE DECLINE AND FALL [Chap, xliii increasing ; the head was in the east, the tail in the west, and it remained visible above forty days. The nations who gazed with astonishment expected wars and calamities from the bale- ful influence ; and these expectations were abundantly fulfilled. The astronomers dissembled their ignorance of the nature of these blazing stars, which they affected to represent as the floating meteors of the air ; and few among them embraced the simple notion of Seneca and the Chaldseans, that they are only planets of a longer period and more eccentric motion. 115 Time and science have justified the conjectures and predictions of the Roman sage ; the telescope has opened new worlds to the eyes of astronomers ; 116 and, in the narrow space of history and fable, one and the same comet is already found to have revisited the earth in seven equal revolutions of five hundred and seventy-five years. The first, 117 which ascends beyond the Christian sera one thousand seven hundred and sixty-seven years, is coeval with Ogyges the father of Grecian antiquity. And this ap- pearance explains the tradition which Varro has preserved, that under his reign the planet Venus changed her colour, size, figure, and course : a prodigy without example either in past or suc- ceeding ages. lls The second visit, in the year eleven hundred and ninety-three, is darkly implied in the fable of Electra the seventh of the Pleiads, who have been reduced to six since the time of the Trojan war. That nymph, the wife of Dardanus, was unable to support the ruin of her country ; she abandoned the dances of her sister orbs, fled from the zodiac to the north pole, and obtained, from her dishevelled locks, the name of the comet. The third period expires in the year six hundred and eighteen, a date that exactly agrees with the tremendous comet 115 Seneca's viith book of Natural Questions displays, in the theory of comets, a philosophic mind. Yet should we not too candidly confound a vague prediction, a veniet tempus, &c. with the merit of real discoveries. 116 Astronomers may study Newton and Halley. I draw my humble science from the article Comete, in the French Encyclopedic, by M. d'Alembert. [See Ap- pendix 21.] 117 Whiston, the honest, pious, visionary Whiston, had fanoied, for the ©ra of Noah's flood (2242 years before Christ), a prior apparition of the same comet which drowned the earth with its tail. 118 A Dissertation of Fr^ret (Memoires de l'Academie des Inscriptions, torn. x. p. 357-377) affords an happy union of philosophy and erudition. The phenomenon in the time of Ogyges was preserved by Varro (apud Augustin. de Civitate Dei, xxi. 8), who quotes Castor, Dion of Naples, and Adrastus of Cyzicus— nobiles mathematici. The two subsequent periods are preserved by the Greek mythologists and the spuri- ous books of Sibylline verses.